November 9, 2009

City Light Hack is a project that was performed by the IEEE student branch in GJU in 30/10/2009 and was deemed a truly successful project, the first of its kind in the Middle East. IEEE (Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers) is a global organizations with more than 300,000 members in universities around the world, and the GJU branch's first project was City Light Hack.

What they did is they turned a building in Madina Monawarra St. with 6x5 windows into a big dot matrix screen by controlling the building's lights using a computer and a board. It's not as easy as it sounds, there's A LOT of programming involved and it took a bunch of 20 students about 3 months of programming and trial and error and succeeded in a project that was only performed in a couple of more countries in the world (it failed in Dubai!).

The video below shows scenes from the show, which despite the rainy whether gathered quite an audience and even caused traffic jams because the people driving would just stop their cars and watch. The police even tried to stop the show at one point!

So congratulations to the team and here's to more amazing achievements!